The twilight language explores hidden meanings and synchromystic connections via onomatology (study of names) and toponymy (study of place names). This blog further investigates "name games" and "number coincidences" found in news and history. Examinations are also found in my book The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004).

Thursday, May 31, 2018

There has been increased media attention to reports of human criminal clown activity.

Two men wearing clown masks held up a Queens, New York, Walgreen's at gunpoint on May 22, 2018.

Then at the Little Caesars pizza shop in Holly Hill, Florida, around 11:50 pm on May 26, 2018, a "clown" attacked an employee closing up the store. The "clown" used a wooden post. The employee pulled out his concealed weapon and shot the attacker dead.

Now, sightings of a Phantom Clown described variously with a "clown mask," and/or with "red hair and red pants," near the Hudson Falls Primary School, occurred on May 29, 2018.

Josh Martin, 45, the guitarist of a grindcore band, died after falling from an escalator at a Rhode Island shopping mall on Monday, May 28, 2018. Grindcore is described as a blend of thrash metal and hardcore punk.

It is worthy of noting that a little over a year ago, Chris Cornell died by suicide. On May 18, 2017, Cornell was found dead in the bathroom of his room at the MGM Grand in Detroit, Michigan, after performing at a show with Soundgarden at the Fox Theatre. The cause of death was determined to be suicide by hanging. Cornell was 52 years old.

On the one year anniversary of Cornell's death on May 18, 2018, Alice in Chains paid tribute to him covering two Soundgarden songs, "Hunted Down" and "Boot Camp", respectively, closing their headlining set at the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio. Towards the end of "Boot Camp," the lights on stage spelled out "CC" for Chris Cornell and "SG" for Soundgarden as feedback rang out. Soundgarden was scheduled to headline the festival in 2017 prior Cornell's death. On May 20, 2018, Tool dedicated their entire set at Rock on the Range to the friends and family of Cornell.

Josh Martin of Newton, Massachusetts' grindcore band Axxx Cxxx was reportedly “clowning around and riding the rail of the escalator” at the Providence Place Mall on Monday night.

One eyewitness said he saw Martin as he “reached the downward slope of the handrail, fell backward off the rail and hit his head on a table in the food court below.”

Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements says the victim fell one floor, from the escalator at the movie theater level to the food court, at the Providence Place Mall just before 11 p.m. Monday.

"It's quite a big drop," Providence Police Major David Lapatin said. "Anybody who has been to the Providence Place Mall in the food court, you see the two escalators going up to the movie theater and Dave & Buster's, you know how high that is."

Police said they were investigating the incident and there appeared to be no indication he jumped or was pushed from the escalator.

Surfing the railing of escalators appears to be a form of parasuicidal behavior (a form of suicidal behavior that appears covert and hidden to others - such as driving fast, ingesting drugs at high volumes, taking risking chances in downhill skiing, working in near death jobs, playing with firearms). Was Josh Martin engaged in parasuicidal behavior within days of the hanging suicides of Ian Curtis of Joy Division (May 18, 1980) and Chris Cornell of Soundgarden (May 18, 2017).

There have been a handful of deaths at the Providence Place Mall since it opened in 1999, including other people falling from escalators. A man died in 2006 after he jumped between escalators and fell.

(A man from Charlotte, North Carolina, died inside the Harrah's Casino in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 7, 2016 after attempting to slide down the handrail of an escalator. The man, James Edward Darst, was in town for a conference. No word on whether Darst was intoxicated at the time he attempted to slide down the rail. A few escalator deaths have been chronicled. See here.)

Martin joined the band in 1996 and jammed with them until 2001. He reunited with the band in 2006 until Seth Putnam (born May 15, 1968), the group’s frontman, died on June 11, 2011 at the age of 43, of a heart attack. He’s also played with other musical acts, including Impaled Northern Moonforest, Failure Clinic, Adolf Satan, and Fxxx.

Born in 1973, he grew up in Connecticut before enrolling at New York University in the 1990s.

He found success with the politically incorrect group after befriending frontman Seth Putnam.

They officially disbanded after Putnam's death.

In November 2017, a video of Josh Martin heckling Gene Simmons (of KISS) during a performance and award ceremony in Providence went viral. Martin was thrown out of the venue. Some have pointed at this incident of evidence of Martin's erratic behavior of late. Others have said it was typical of Martin's personality.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Two men wearing clown masks held up a Queens pharmacy at gunpoint on May 22, 2018. This caused a Twitter user to post this tweet:

Then it was only four days until the next evil clown story.

Heriberto Feliciano, 28, was closing up the Little Caesars pizza shop in Holly Hill, Florida, around 11:50 pm on Saturday, May 26, 2018. A "clown" was waiting for him at the side door and attacked him with a wooden post. When the post broke, the masked man pushed Feliciano to the ground and tried to stab him with scissors. Feliciano retrieved a concealed firearm and fired four to five shots at close range. The masked man died at the hospital. Source.

The Holly Hill Police Department released the photograph of the mask (at top) worn by the individual who attacked the Little Caesars employee.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

"I had planned to take my kids to Louie's, but drove over to a Mexican restaurant instead. Something told me not to go to Louie's."

So began my realization that a shooting I had heard about earlier had touched a close correspondent friend of mine.

Perhaps it was Andrew W. Griffin's covert awareness of the power behind the name, Louie's? (See his "Louis/Lewis," in Red Dirt Report, February 13, 2017.)

Whatever the reason, I was happy that this posting was not so close to home. But it is for lots of people, as time goes by and these incidents become commonplace. In terms of people and places that are now touched by mass shootings, this set my mind to thinking about the issue of Thanatourism. I wrote about disaster and dark tourism earlier today, here.

The Incident
"Louie's" is Louie's by the Lake on Lake Hefner. It is one of many Louie's in the region, and the one that Andrew goes to with his kids. Just like many people go to with their children.

Both Nazario and Whittle had their weapons in the trunks of their vehicles. As the situation unfolded, both of the men were able to go to their vehicles and retrieve their firearms and shot the firing suspect.

The Shooter

Alexander Tilghman took a selfie in front of library book shelves of titles catalogued from 973, the United States, through 999, Extraterrestrial Worlds.

Alexander C. Tilghman, 28, of Oklahoma City, was identified as the shooter in Thursday evening's shooting that left four people injured, police said.

Tilghman died after he suffered multiple gunshot wounds, the state medical examiner's office said.

Police said three people, two female children and one adult female, were shot by the shooter identified as Tilghman. All three shooting victims are in good condition and are expected survive, police said.

A fourth person was also injured during the shooting. The adult male reportedly fell and broke his arm during the altercation. He is in good condition.

Tilghman

Tilghman was licensed as an armed security guard. The Oklahoma Council on Law Enforcement and Training's Gerald Konkler said Alexander Tilghman held an active license as an armed guard and there were no disciplinary actions against Tilghman.

Other than a domestic assault and battery complaint against Tilghman when he was a 13 years old, Tilghman had no other run-ins with police. Oklahoma City Police say their last official contact with Alex Tilghman was in 2003. In a police report, Tilghman’s mother said he had punched her in the chest and arms following a fight over the family vacuum cleaner.

The Tilghman name is possibly an altered spelling of the German Tilchmann, an occupational name for someone who raised or tended trees, from Middle Low German telge "branch," "young tree," "seedling."

Demonic Attacks, Gays, and Clones
“I am under hardcore demonic attack you know; I really need some real people in my life so get in touch with me ASAP,” Alex Tilghman said into the camera for his YouTube page. The post happened weeks before police say he went into Louie’s Bar and Grill on Lake Hefner and opened fire.

Tilghman lived in Oklahoma City and his social media posts are filled with cryptic references to demonic attacks. In one video posted from the Oklahoma City Zoo, Tilghman complained of a demon-possessed squirrel, which followed him around the park.

Other videos posted three weeks before the shooting, Tilghman appears to be recording video near Lake Hefner of the cars passing by, which he claimed Satan was making sound louder. Tilghman advertised his social media page using bumper stickers and posters he left around town. One poster that pointed to his YouTube warned of “Demons in Cloned Transsexual Bodies.”
“I even have my refrigerator attacking me,” a monotone Tilghman said in the video. “It turns on when I am thinking something.”

His monologues mix between this demonic possession belief and one where he feels he is living in a “matrix.” The “matrix” Tilghman talks about is in reference to a series of movies of the same name where humans are part of a computer-generated world and have to be liberated from that cybernetic network in order to be free.

In a strange twist of reality and the same name, Alexander Tilghman is the moniker of Shirley Tilghman's nine-years-younger son. And who is Shirley Tilghman? She is a world famous pioneer in cloning, and former president of Princeton University. The other Alexander Tilghman, the Louie's shooter, was obsessed with demons and clones. In terms of parallelism, it is quite weird.

Other happenstances include that a county in southwestern Oklahoma is called "Tillman." Around 1966 or so, there was a strange UFO sighting near the town of Davidson in Tillman County, Oklahoma. A man encountered an alien "repairing a craft" near the side of the road. The story is shared by John Keel.

For today, I wish to ponder a prediction that mass shootings will lead to a form of thanatourism that includes locations of mass violence. Few in the synchromystism field have examined the rather recent, and yet large movement in this direction.

Dates for some thanatourism pilgrimages are important, of course, such as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 2018. While the building where he was killed has been torn down, the Ambassador Hotel exists in a high quality replica building by InFocusTech.

Here's an overview of thanatourism:

Thanatourism is derived from the ancient Greek word thanatos for the personification of death. (Not to be confused, directly, with the Marvel character Thanos, but you can imagine how creators Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin came up with that name.)

Disaster tourism is the act of traveling to a disaster area for pleasure, usually out of curiosity.

Disaster Tourism is used for leisure travels to zones whipped by natural disasters or traumatic events known as "traumascapes."

Dark tourism (also black tourism or grief tourism) has been defined as tourism involving travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy.

Example destinations in the specific form of thanatourism more generally known as "dark tourism" include:

Destinations of dark tourism include castles and battlefields such as Culloden in Scotland and Bran Castle and Poienari Castle in Romania, former prisons such as Beaumaris Prison in Anglesey, Wales, the Jack the Ripper exhibition in the London Dungeon, sites of natural disasters or man made disasters, such as Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan, Chernobyl in Ukraine and the commercial activity at Ground Zero in New York one year after September 11, 2001. It also includes sites of human atrocities and genocide, such as the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in China, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, the sites of the Jeju Uprising in South Korea and the Spirit Lake Internment Camp Centre near La Ferme, Quebec as an example of Canada's internment operations of 1914–1920.
On Bali "death and funeral rites have become commodified for tourism ..., where enterprising businesses begin arranging tourist vans and sell tickets as soon as they hear someone is dying." In the US, visitors can tour the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC "with an identity card which matches their age and gender with that of a name and photo of a real holocaust victim. Against a backdrop of video interpretation portraying killing squads in action, the pseudo holocaust victim enters a personal ID into monitors as they wander around the attraction to discover how their real-life counterpart is faring."

In late 2017, the online journal Current Issues in Dark Tourism Research was launched. The aim of the online journal is to bring affordable 'dark tourism' scholarship direct to students, researchers, and the media. The journal is unique in that it pays royalty fees to authors and, as a result, is a new model for contemporary academic publishing. Authors and scholars may submit their own related research for publication in the journal. A broad range of 'dark tourism and difficult heritage' research will be available in the journal, in the form of articles, case studies, and commentaries. The editor of the journal is Dr Philip Stone.

Popular Mechanics published a list of "8 Disaster Tourism Sites," by Laura Kiniry, August 30, 2013, "for your next family vacation." They include:

1. Chernobyl Power Plant (site of the radioactive accident, April 26, 1986), in the restricted Chernobyl Exclusion Zone situated in the Ivankiv Raion of northern Kiev Oblast, near Ukraine's border with Belarus.
2. Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst (where the Hindenburg caught fire, May 6, 1937) Lakehurst, New Jersey.
3. Exxon Valdez Oil Spill (where 30 million gallons of oil leaked, March 24, 1989) Bligh Reef, Prince William Sound, Alaska.
4. Chelyabinsk Meteor (where it struck on February 15, 2014), Chelyabinsk, southern Urals; Lake Chebarkul; and Ilmen Reserve, Russia.
5. Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site (site of the tests in 1946-1958), Marshall Islands, Pacific Ocean.
6. Hanford Site (built in 1943, decommissioned 1964-1971), Benton County, along the Columbia River, Washington State.
7. Hurricane Katrina (hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005), especially the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, Louisiana.
8. Pompeii (due to the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD), at the base of the volcano, Italy. Popular Mechanics calls it the "mother of all disaster tourism sites."

Friday, May 25, 2018

A week later, on May 25, 2018, another school took place at a middle school (pictured above) in Noblesville, Indiana, leaving three shot.

A suspect - David Moore - was in custody after what Indiana State Police earlier had called an active shooter incident at Noblesville West Middle School.

Noblesville police Chief Kevin Jowitt told reporters that a teacher and a student were taken to hospitals with injuries. But hospital officials said at least three people, including one adult, were being treated. One student had an ankle fracture.

The teacher injured in the Noblesville West Middle School shooting Friday morning has been identified as Jason Seaman, according to multiple parents interviewed by IndyStar who have children in the school.

Parents also described how Seaman intervened to help stop the shooter.

Seaman has been a science teacher for Noblesville schools for nearly four years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also has been a football coach for seventh-graders for two years.

Seaman, it turns out, was a defensive lineman for the Salukis, the Southern Illinois University football team. (I too am a Saluki - a product of a higher education in Little Egypt. See #9, here. Congratulations to Seaman for intervening in a positive fashion during this school shooting.)

Jowitt said the shooting was reported shortly after 9 a.m. He said the situation was contained and that a male student was in custody.
"We believe he is the involved suspect," he said.
Jowitt said a secondary threat was received at Noblesville High School.
"We have multiple officers and a command post established at Noblesville High School and are diligently ensuring the safety of students and staff there," he said. "We have not received any information that this has been anything other than a communicated threat."
Aerial news video showed rows of students being evacuated and escorted to school buses.
Students were being taken to Noblesville High, where parents can pick them up, the state police said.

Noblesville was once noted for its flour mills, the mostly widely known of which was the Noblesville Milling Company, producer of Diadem and Kismet flours. In 1925, the manager of the company offered to buy uniforms for the local high school athletic team in exchange for the school adopting the nickname "Millers." The nickname persists to this day.

Noblesville's Weird History

The old Hamilton County Sheriff's Residence and Jail on the southwest corner of the courthouse square in downtown Noblesville, Indiana, is now the home of the Hamilton County Museum of History.

Charles Manson, as a teen in Indiana.

The site use to be a working jail that once housed Charles Manson as a teenager and D. C. Stephenson, former Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan. The Stephenson trial, which took place in the adjoining Hamilton County courthouse in 1925, broke the power of the Klan in Indiana and drew national attention to Noblesville. Stephenson was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of Madge Oberholtzer. During the early 1920s, Noblesville was one of several Indiana towns in which the Ku Klux Klan was active, but the Klan's influence quickly faded in the wake of Stephenson's conviction.

August 11, 2006, Seth Pickett (from left), Clayton Grahm and Joey Woodruff, three Hamilton County boaters, hold the 19-foot python they discovered on the banks of the White River near Strawtown, a community north of Noblesville, Indiana. — Tim Miller / Indianapolis Star (Credit: Chad Arment) Source.

Then there's the case of Danne D. Buchanan. Known within the Bigfoot community as “SquatchCommando,” Dan Buchanan started in 2007, arguing for a pro-Bigfoot position on an internet radio show, "Let's Talk Bigfoot." SquatchCommando was a Marine Corps veteran who encountered a Bigfoot while on a training mission at Quantico, Virginia. Buchanan was interested in hunting Bigfoot, but he advocated tranquilizing them and taking biological samples. He was not for killing or capturing them, but merely doing what needed to be done to prove they exist.

Buchanan, only 41, was out apparently enjoying some music near Noblesville, Indiana, when he was hit and killed on August 14, 2007, while walking outside the Verizon Wireless Music Center after the Ozzfest concert. That was the sad, quick end of his attempt at finding Bigfoot.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Two men wearing clown masks held up a Queens pharmacy at gunpoint on Tuesday morning, May 22, 2018, reported CBS New York.

Police said the suspects walked into the Walgreens on Rockaway Boulevard around 5:30 a.m. and pointed a gun at the security guard. They rounded up the employees, ransacked the place and stole two sacks filled with prescription drugs.

The men took off in a black BMW waiting outside and went east on Rockaway Boulevard. The suspects were described as Hispanic men in their 20s.

Police later found two duffle bags filled with oxycodone, morphine, Percocet and Adderall left outside a building on Hendrix Street in Brooklyn. Investigators believe those were some, but not all, of the drugs taken during the robbery.

Today's Tuesday clown robbery at a New York Walgreens closely matches the Tuesday, October 4, 2016 clown robbery at a Detroit Walgreens.

CBS Detroit reported that police were searching for a suspect who robbed a drug store at gunpoint — while wearing a scary clown mask. The incident happened around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 4, 2016, at the Walgreens on West and Telegraph roads in Brownstown Township, Detroit, Michigan.

According to police, the suspect entered the store with his gun drawn and demanded cash.

“He had on a black hoodie pulled over his head, a white clown mask underneath and dark colored pants,” Deputy Chief Robert Matthews said.

The suspect made off with $300 to $400 cash, fleeing the scene in a blue Chevy Impala.

A suspect in the 2016 clown robberies was later identified and other clown crimes were detailed. See here.

Monday, May 21, 2018

On April 16, 2018, American actress Pamela Gidley, best known for her role as Teresa Banks, the murder victim in the Twin Peaks prequel Fire Walk With Me (1992), died at the age of 52. She passed away "peacefully" at her home in Seabrook, New Hampshire. A cause of death was not been made public.

Gidley, a former child model, was named the "Most Beautiful Girl in the World" by Wilhelmina Modeling Agency in 1985. She transitioned into acting a year later, appearing alongside Josh Brolin and future Twin Peaks co-star Sherilyn Fenn in Thrashin'.

Gidley was born in Methuen, Massachusetts, and raised in Salem, New Hampshire. Salem, New Hampshire is known as the site of America's Stonehenge (also called Mystery Hill), a mysterious megalith structure. Allegedly, H. P. Lovecraft visited Mystery Hill in Salem, New Hampshire, and then wrote The Dunwich Horror. Seabrook, New Hampshire, is the location of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station.

May 21, 2018, is the first anniversary of the rebooting of the David Lynch television series Twin Peaks from 25 years. Series 3, as it was called, premiered on May 21, 2017.

The towns of Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City – which became the primary filming locations for stock Twin Peaks exterior footage – are about an hour's drive from the town of Roslyn, Washington, the town used for the series Northern Exposure. Many exterior scenes were filmed in wooded areas of Malibu, California.

One man was killed and another seriously injured when they encountered a cougar on May 19, 2018, while mountain biking in the general area where Twin Peaks was filmed in Washington State.

The area of the cougar attack, which left one human dead, and the cat tracked down & killed was near Snoqualmie Falls, Washington State, the site of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series.

Authorities said the two men were on a morning bike ride in the foothills near North Bend when the attack occurred. The town is about 30 miles east of Seattle.

The mountain lion ran into the woods and officers with the Washington Department of Fish and Game later tracked it down and shot and killed it, said Capt. Alan Myers of the state’s Fish & Wildlife Police.

The 31-year-old survivor was taken to a hospital in Seattle. He was initially listed in serious condition in the emergency room but was alert and talking; his condition was later upgraded to satisfactory, The Seattle Times reported.

A search and rescue team was dispatched to recover the body of the deceased man.

KIRO-TV reported that the injured man called 911 shortly before 11 a.m. and shouted, “Can you hear me? Help!” and then the call hung up.

Authorities found the cougar standing over the body of the dead biker, the station reported. The first man attacked said the cougar had his entire head in the cat's mouth. The second man jumped off his bike, and ran into the forest. The mountain lion, a 3-year-old thin male, chased him down and killed him.

Reporter Andrew W. Griffin reminds us that in the Series 3 opener, "two young people are killed in that first episode by an entity - their heads torn off."
In the last 100 years in North America, roughly 25 fatalities and 95 nonfatal cougar attacks have been reported, the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife said, but there was only one other fatal attack in the state. However, more attacks have been reported in the western United States and Canada over the past 20 years than in the previous 80 years.

The area of the cougar attack and the Twin Peaks locations are known for weird crimes.

(1) On that same road nine years after Twin Peaks premiered, then 39-year-old Dayva Cross stabbed his wife and two of his stepdaughters to death in their rambling brown ranch house. He kept a third stepdaughter captive in his bedroom for hours, dragging her out occasionally so he could refill his wine glass.
The 13-year-old escaped. Police later found Cross slumped on his bed, smoking a cigarette. The crime rattled Snoqualmie, which was already on edge. Because two weeks before Cross’s killing spree, a family dog in the area had brought home a grisly trophy: part of a human hand that police later traced to a woman’s remains.

(2) In the decade before Twin Peaks, the Green River Killer began his deadly rampage throughout the Pacific Northwest. Gary L Ridgway, described as America’s most prolific serial killer, was a commercial truck painter who preyed on women at the margins of society.
In 2003, he led investigators to the remains of April Buttram, 17, one of at least five victims he buried in and around Snoqualmie and North Bend. The teenager had disappeared 20 years earlier.

(3) In 2014, a tiny body was discovered along a lonely stretch of country road between Snoqualmie and North Bend. Her umbilical cord was still attached. She was wrapped in a towel. Local authorities in rural Washington state named her Baby Kimball, after the creek near where she was found. Three years have passed. Her life and death remain a mystery. But Valley residents have since erected a small shrine on Southeast North Bend Way to mark where the newborn was discarded. Its sides are rough wood; its roof, pale green metal siding. Inside, there’s a white cross with Baby Kimball written in black marker.

Followers

Search This Blog

Follow by Email

About Me

Investigator of human and animal mysteries since 1960. Swamp Thing character "Coleman Wadsworth" in #4:7 and more in #4:8, is a tribute.
Author of over 35 books, including The Unidentified (1975), Mysterious America (1983/2007), Suicide Clusters (1987), Cryptozoology A to Z (1999), Bigfoot! (2003), The Copycat Effect (2004), and field guides.
Educated in anthropology-zoology at SIU-Carbondale, and psychiatric social work at Simmons College School of Social Work. Began doctoral work in anthropology (Brandeis University) and family violence (UNH). Taught at NE universities (1980 to 2003), while concurrently a senior researcher at the Muskie School (1983 to 1996), before retiring to write, lecture, consult, & open museum. Popular documentary course was taught for 23 semesters; appeared on C2C, The Larry King Show, MonsterQuest, Lost Tapes, In Search Of, and other tv programs.
Loren Coleman is a dedicated father (Caleb, Malcolm, Des), cryptozoologist, media consultant, and baseball fan.